Finalist 2010

07 January 2016

All crazy now

The last American beer I wrote about was from Colorado's Crazy Mountain Brewing. I normally try to mix things up a bit better, but this can had been sitting in the fridge since Thomas gifted it to me and was well overdue being opened.

As the name suggests, Neomexicanus is brewed with the distinctive south-western hop variety. Unlike the Neomexicanus beer that St. Mel's Brewery produced last year, the hops in this one came from a commercial farm in Washington State rather than a desert monastery. Can conditioning deposited a lot of yeasty goop in the bottom of the tin so the beer poured hazy -- pale yellow like a witbier. Smells a bit witlike too: a mix of soapy spices and lemons. Lemon is very pronounced in the flavour, calling to mind of the effect normally produced by Sorachi Ace hops. There's a little of the fried savoury quality found in the St. Mel's beer but it's altogether a lighter and more quaffable affair; it certainly doesn't taste anywhere close to 6% ABV, though a pleasantly American resinous quality creeps in if you don't quaff it too fast.

A fun beer overall, even if it's not as charmingly off-kilter as its Irish cousin. Neomexicanus hops remain on my "ooh, this'll be interesting" watchlist. Cheers for the can, Thomas.

2 comments:

I opened one of them at the weekend actually. I didn't take notes but I was struck by how big and bold the hops were. It pretty much tasted like an average American IPA. It wasn't very witbier like for me. Perhaps because mine had been sitting in the fridge for a month and the yeast had settled to the bottom or I just had a less yeasty can perhaps. I do recall a little lemon peel but it was full on resinous with mandarin and grapefruit bulking up the citrus qualities.That's about all I can recall as shortly after that beer, a fair amount of whiskey was consumed until 5am.